Chapter nine: His father's mistake

Garrison went very still.

Then he started laughing.

Deep, gut-wrenching laughter that filled the room and kept filling it, doubling him over, the whiskey bottle swinging loose from his fingers. He laughed until his eyes watered, until he had to brace himself against the windowsill to stay upright.

"The Moon Goddess," he managed between breaths. "She really does have the sickest sense of humor."

"It's not funny."

"It's the funniest thing that's ever happened to me." Garrison straightened, wiping his face with the back of his hand. "My perfect son. My self-righteous, principled son who spent his entire adult life looking down at me for falling for a stripper." He shook his head slowly. "And his fated mate is exactly the same."

"She's nothing like Lydia."

"No?" The smile turned. "She takes her clothes off for money. Dances for men she doesn't know. Human, I'm guessing. No pack, no protection, nobody standing in her corner." He let that sit for a moment.

"That's Lydia. That's Lydia down to the bone. The only difference is I had a choice. I had Mirelle, beautiful, devoted Mirelle, and I chose Lydia anyway. But you." He pointed the bottle at Kadence's chest.

"You don't get to choose. The bond's already in you. Already eating you alive. You're fate's puppet and she's pulling every string."

"Get out."

Garrison kept going like he hadn't heard it. "You'll go back to her. Maybe not tonight, maybe not tomorrow, but you'll go back because the mate bond won't let you do anything else." He moved toward the door, unhurried, the bottle loose at his side.

"And when you bring her into this house, when you try to make a stripper your Luna, just remember something." His voice dropped to just above a whisper. "I warned you. At least I could walk away from Lydia when I was done. You'll be stuck with her until one of you dies."

Something inside Kadence detonated.

His fist drew back before the thought finished forming, every muscle in his body cocking toward his father's face, his wolf surging forward so hard his vision bled gold at the edges. Violence moved through his blood like something that had been waiting a long time for permission.

Garrison didn't move. Didn't flinch. Just stood there with that ugly, patient smile.

"Do it," he said quietly. "Hit me. Show me how different you are."

Six inches. That was all the distance left between his knuckles and his father's face.

'Hit him. Make him feel what she felt. Make him pay for all of it.'

But underneath that, quieter and colder and somehow louder than everything else:

'If you hit him, you become him.'

And just like that Kadence saw it. The shape of the trap. The reason Garrison was standing so still, so calm, so ready. He needed this. Needed proof that the rot went all the way down, that his son was just as broken, that everything he'd built and protected and bled for over fourteen years was nothing more than a longer fuse on the same charge.

Then something worse moved through him, cutting under the rage and finding something softer underneath.

'You're already like him. You ran from her. You stood in that parking lot and judged her the same way he judged Lydia. You are exactly what you've been afraid of.'

'You already are him.'

Kadence's fist changed direction.

It hit the wall beside his father's head with everything he had.

The impact was catastrophic. His hand went through drywall, through the beam behind it, through everything, like the wall had never been anything more than the idea of a wall. The sound cracked through the room. Dust exploded outward in a white cloud. When he pulled his arm back a hole the size of a dinner plate sat where his knuckles had been, jagged at the edges, insulation hanging loose from the cavity inside.

Blood ran from his knuckles and hit the floor.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

Garrison hadn't moved. Hadn't even blinked.

"Feel better?" he asked.

Kadence stared at the hole. At the blood collecting on the hardwood beneath his hand. At his father's face, completely unmoved, waiting with the patience of a man who'd already won and knew it.

He saw himself clearly then, maybe for the first time. The rage, the violence, the hole in the wall, blood on the floor. His father's legacy written out in broken things and broken people, and here he was adding to the collection like it was the most natural thing in the world.

"Get out," he said. Quiet. Completely still.

"That's what I thought." Garrison brushed past him toward the door without hurrying. "Punch all the walls you want, boy. Doesn't change what you are or who made you."

His footsteps faded down the hallway.

Kadence didn't move for a long moment. Just stood there with blood dripping off his knuckles and the silence pressing in from every direction. Somewhere out there, Asha was driving home confused and hurting and completely alone in something she didn't have words for yet.

Because of him.

The same way his mother had spent years confused and hurting and alone.

Because of Garrison.

He walked to the door. His bloody hand left a print on the handle. He looked back once at the hole in the wall, at the evidence of everything he'd sworn he'd never become, then pulled the door shut behind him with enough force to shake the frame.